Last Updated: May 30, 2024, as of MereChurch 1.5.
Sermons and resources are the lifeblood of your church website. If you want your website to be findable on search engines and have optimized SEO, there are three principles to look for:
- A fast website (we've got you covered)
- A mobile-friendly website (we've got you covered)
- Good and original content
This last marker is the most important thing that Google looks for when ranking your site in search engine results. Thus, having your sermons uploaded to your website can meaningfully lead to more people visiting your website. You are a steward of a vast trove of excellent, original content, new every week.
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Taxonomies (like author, series, and topic) are the ways we organize resources. A taxonomy is a way to sort a library: by author, by series, and so on. This sermons was preached by "Bob Gibson" about "Romans 8." This sermon was in the series "DNA" and is about "faith."
This resource is actually a PDF handout, so it needs a different Resource Type set than sermon. And we should probably tell people what the handout is about with a topic!
MereChurch makes it a cinch to navigate even hundreds of different topics, series, scriptures, authors, and dates with powerful Index pages. Index pages show you all authors on the site, or all scripture references on the site, and quickly let visitors find all resources that belong inside a taxonomy term (like the topic "faith" or the author "Bob Gibson").
Why Bother?
It may seem like a good amount of work to upload sermons each week and tag them appropriately —but we've worked hard to make this process as painless as possible for you! See: Add a sermon to my library. Here are a few reasons you should consider listing your sermons publicly on your website:
Serve your Church Family
An archive of past sermons is an invaluable tool for members of your congregation who are unable to worship in person, experiencing a season of illness, or just missed a week for one reason or another.
Additionally, finding past resources on a particular area of interest (like "sanctification" or "Romans 12") will serve members of your church in their own personal study of God's word.
Serve your Visitors
Fresh, original content is one of the key things that web crawlers like Google and other SEO bots use to determine if your website is up to date and reputable. As a church, you have access to a treasure trove of content: every Sunday, a new sermon can be added to the website.
Whether it's an audio recording, video link, or even a text transcript, your visitors (and SEO crawlers) will still need tools to dissect and understand the resources available on your websites.
In short, organizing your resources with taxonomies and taxonomy terms helps visitors to find what they're looking for — which helps guide them towards visiting your church.
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If you still have questions, please feel free to get in touch! We're here to help you with your MereChurch.